Boris Charmatz / Emmanuelle Huynh / Odile Duboc boléro 2 / étrangler le temps

As performers under the direction of Odile Duboc, Boris Charmatz and Emmanuelle Huynh have never stopped dancing the duo from the trois boleros – a sort of reference point. From this ongoing impulse another version was born, slower this time, and which unveiled other nuances of this loving interweaving of two bodies. boléro 2 / étrangler le temps gives us two sightlines on a physical landscape on the border with sculpture.

In 1996, during the creative process behind the piece trois boleros, Odile Duboc gave the second bolero to Boris Charmatz and Emmanuelle Huynh to perform – a languid duo contrasting with the other two versions. In this suspended duo, two writhing bodies searched for each other, as if magnetically attracted to one another, exposing all the contrasts of contact. After having performed it for several years, Boris Charmatz and Emmanuelle Huynh presented a slowed down version of bolero 2 during the opening of the Musée de la danse in 2009. From out of this slowing down of gesture and music came the desire to delve deeper into its matter. Partly as a homage to Odile Duboc but also as an authorial gesture which injected into this close contact duo traces of their own work, étrangler le temps forms a dividing line between two era: a concentration of time… In the act of this slowing down, the performers are plunged into weightlessness, on the frontier with sculpture. The unceasing slowness of each movement has a multiplying effect on the intertwining of the two bodies, producing magnifying glass-like effects on the flesh, in terms of its permeability, contractions, and contact zones. Between the étranglée piece and its original version, a dialogue is at work which brings up issues of interpretation, archive and transmission. Within this stretching of states that Odile Duboc dedicated her life to exploring, another history of dance is written, by the moving bodies which made and perpetuate it.
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Running time: 1h10